Steady as you go!

It is depressing how all the evidence is building for a summer, autumn and winter of discontent and we, the everyday victims, have little choice but, Canute-like, to sit there at the edge of the threatening ocean of strikes and allow them to wash over us. If you are as old as I am, you will have been here before and you will know that, at some point, strikers and their intended target, government, will have to sit down and thrash out some sort of compromise which will require both to give a little. I ask now, as I have asked over many years before, why does it have to get to this point before intelligent leaders on both sides sit down and thrash out the solution which is going to be the end point of this tragic game? Why the need for self-inflicted suffering when there is so much unavoidable sacrifice ahead for all of us?